And the glory goes to...Last Call for Google I/O winners
This post is by Monica Tran of the Google I/O Team. In the past four years,
Monica has been around the world, working as a Product Marketing Manager in Mountain View,
London, and Tokyo. Now that she's come full circle to Developer Marketing, she is focused
primarily on Google I/O and our international Developer Days. -scottkIt seems like only yesterday that we announced our
Last Call for
Google I/O contest. We’ve been keeping busy, judging Round 2 submissions for all 10
of our challenges. The winners have been notified via email and will receive a pass to this
year’s sold-out Google I/O. Also, all of the Round 1 answers, as well as Round 2 prompts have
been posted to the
contest site.
We were really impressed with the quality of the submissions--especially with
less than 24 hours to turn the code around! Check out screenshots of some of the winning
entries below, along with notes from members of each Google Developer Relations group, and
stay tuned for more surprises from the I/O team.
Android
Judging was easy for the
Android challenge, because our first run through the apps produced a total of exactly 10
places where the reviewer said “Nice!”. Above you see a screenshot of the “Party mode” in
Charles Vaughn’s “Bounce Clock”. Read about the details on our
Android
Developers Blog.
- Tim Bray, Android Developer
Advocate
Chrome
(Click a doodle to go to its site and interact.)
We received a lot of nifty doodles and it was tough to pick only ten winners.
Some of the particularly fun doodles were interactive or involved a game of some sort (like
Pong, or Simon with the Chrome logo). We definitely appreciated being able to view the source
code of the web page to see how developers took advantage of the latest HTML, CSS, and JS
technologies.
- Jeffrey Chang, Chrome Product Manager
Games
(Click a screen shot to play a game.)
Congratulations to everyone who knew the Konami code and somehow managed to recall that
Kuribo’s Shoe is only found on one stage of World Five in Super Mario Bros. 3...and after
remembering all that, were still able to write a game in only 24 hours. Apparently playing
video games as a kid doesn’t rot your brain as much as our moms said it would.
Almost all of our submissions were fun, technically impressive, or both. The
judges were video game industry veterans, so we weren’t wowed by flashy graphics alone. We
tried to reward a balance of fun gameplay and technical prowess. Some of the games were
actually pretty addictive!
- Ian Lewis, Games Developer Advocate
YouTube
We saw some great submissions that put the new
iframe Player
API through its paces! The winning submissions offered a mix of cross-browser
compatibility, stylish user interface, and the ability to reuse the player for arbitrary
sequences anywhere on the web.
- Jeffrey Posnick, YouTube Developer
Advocate
Apps
Our Google Apps challenge was built around
Google Apps Script, a
JavaScript cloud scripting language that allows developers to automate tasks across Google
products and interact with 3rd-party APIs. In round 1, we asked contestants to find the median
stock price of stock symbols. Round 2 was a fairly open challenge, and the winning submissions
performed tasks such as predicting future traffic accidents on Google Maps, producing a daily
meeting agenda using Google Calendar and LinkedIn, and sharing Flickr pictures via e-mail to
friends and family.
- Ryan Boyd, Google Apps Developer Advocate
Accessibility
We enjoyed seeing how much the ten top entries were
able to achieve in such a short time in developing a caption rating app for YouTube (
at least one dedicated
tweeter pulled an all-nighter). Our top picks really impressed us with the
accessibility and polish of their UI. All of them have
TalkBack
speech support through the
Android
Accessibility API. Most of the winners have already published and open sourced their
work. If these apps inspire you,
take a look at the
source and contribute!
- Naomi Black, Accessibility Technical
Program Manager
Commerce
They say that great minds think alike, and in the case of Google
Commerce, our developers created similar mashups. A simple store based on Google Product
Search and Google Checkout could be a powerful tool for mom and pop shops. We hope our
developers had fun learning about the commerce products that Google offers.
- Ossama Alami, Commerce/Geo Developer Relations
Geo
We asked developers to create a mobile web application to
discover interesting walks around San Francisco. We had some really impressive entries,
especially given they were developed in a very short timeframe.
-
Ossama Alami, Commerce/Geo Developer Relations
Google Web
Toolkit (GWT)
We were very impressed with the creativity and performance of the
I/O countdown entries. All of the submissions were great examples of what is possible with
GWT and HTML5/CSS3. It was an
extremely tight competition that came down to tough decisions based on originality, visual
appeal, and the size of the resulting JavaScript.
- Chris Ramsdale,
GWT/Developer Tools Program Engineer
App
Engine
Developers submitted a simple Fibonacci web app in
Round 1, where the key was to demonstrate that you correctly handled bad input. We were amazed
at the apps that were submitted for Round 2, where we asked developers to create an
interesting app using one or more of several App Engine APIs. From making
book recommendations to
visualizing author impact on
PubMed (a favorite of mine, my wife being an academic in medicine), we found many
apps useful, well designed, and often quite elaborate.
- Patrick
Chanezon, App Engine Developer Relations
Congratulations from the
entire Google I/O team to the winners of all the challenges. The bar was quite high and even
if you didn’t win, we hope you learned something while building your applications. We
encourage you to hone your skills for challenges to come!
